Drum Notaion
Im trying to write a simple drum grove in 4/4 with kick drum doing quarters, snare on 1 and 3 and hi-hat doing all the upbeats. I have the kick and snare figured out but when I try to put in the hi-hat in the voice 3 position, it defaults to editing voice 1 even though I'm in notation mode and have voice 3 selected.
Comments
Why voice 3?
From the handbook:
"For a drumset, one or two voices can be used. If the latter, voice 1 (the upper voice) usually contains (up-stem) notes played by the hands while voice 2 (the lower voice) usually contains (down-stem) notes played by the feet (see image below)."
See:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/drum-notation
look at the example
In reply to Why voice 3? From the… by Jm6stringer
Okay that makes more sense. I thought that since every piece in the drumset is technically a different instrument they had to be in different voices. Thank you for the help.
In reply to Okay that makes more sense… by brandonnotstew
While it's true that a cowbell is a different "instrument" from a snare drum, in percussion it is the notation of the rhythm (and not necessarily the duration) that is important. A single hit on a snare can't sustain the sound for, say, 4 beats (i.e., a whole note) while the cowbell simultaneously plays quarter notes. The location of that snare hit (on which beat in the measure) shows the important information. A cowbell hit may coincide with that snare hit in which case they could share the same note stem, same voice.
Instruments such as organ, piano, guitar, etc. that can sustain a note while simultaneously playing other(s) of different duration(s) often use different voices even though a single "instrument".
See:
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/voices